A Woman on Twitter is Abused Every 30 Seconds (fastcompany.com)

That shocking statistic comes from a study conducted by Amnesty International and AI software startup Element AI. From a report: In the study, called Troll Patrol, Amnesty International and Element AI looked at data from 288,000 tweets sent to 778 female politicians and journalists in the U.S. and U.K. in 2017. Using machine learning on the data, the group then extrapolated just how wide-ranging abuse toward women is on Twitter. The result: 1.1 million abusive or problematic tweets were sent to the women in the study during the year -- that's one abusive or problematic tweet every 30 seconds. And it's even worse for women of color -- and especially black women -- who were targeted more frequently than white women.

Comments

What does problematic mean?

[Anonymous Coward]

How many men are abused or sent problematic tweets on twitter.

Why limit research to one segment to create a self confirming headline?

Re:What does problematic mean?

[easyTree]

Who cares, only women and children matter. Men are to be sent into battle.

Re: What does problematic mean?

[phantomfive]

They really needed a control group here.

Re:What does problematic mean?

[Anonymous Coward]

On the face of it, attacks on women appear distinct in their character from attacks on men, although exactly how different is obviously possible to exaggerate. But before you object, yes, there have been studies that focus on male victims of social media bullying too, they just didn't get a mention here.

Of course they wouldn't mention it. Because those studies show overall, men receive more online abuse. That wouldn't go so well for the desired outcome of this particular "study".

Re: What does problematic mean?

[karlandtanya]

Folks, this ain't science; if you measure it by that yardstick it will come up short.

To answer your question, it's because the popular narrative is that women are victims, passive, and must be protected while not-women are villains, aggressive, and must be punished. Of course, repeatedly recognizing that your sample set ' 778 women politicians and journalists with an active, non-protected Twitter account, with fewer than 1 million followers' is flawed doesn't make it any less so. The sample isn't chosen to test a hypothesis; the goal here is to tell a story.

Element AI has provided a sample of their work to Amnesty in exchange for some goodwill. Decorating their product in the style of a scientific study is similarly insincere.

As an ad for Element AI it's valid: We can generate buzz for your issue.
As a political statement from Amnesty International, it's also valid: We need more civil and more enforcable social norms in social media.

As social science it's crap, but that's neither Element AI's or Amnesty Internal's job.

Re:What does problematic mean?

[sfcat]

Why limit research to one segment to create a self confirming headline?

To answer your question: because you can't study everything at the same time without making assumptions you can't justify yet. This happens all the time in social sciences. Before you can safely lump things together you have to study them separately.

I was going to mod you down for this but I will comment instead. This isn't science. If someone thinks it is, then they need to turn in their science card at the library. Anytime you setup an experiment, you have a control group. The amount of anything experienced by one group only has meaning when compared to the amount experienced by another group(s) which usually includes a control group. In this case, probably a group of men (or at least non-women). If it came out that the control group is attacked by someone on twitter every second what conclusion would you draw from those two data sets. If instead it was once every minute that a person in the control group was abused, would your conclusions be different? Add to that that possibly there is a gender imbalance in numbers of interactions per capita between the two groups and this one bit of research is meaningless. And it's stuff like this that causes "social scientists" to be considered junk science and for their entire field to be put into quotes by other scientists. Because an experiment without a control group isn't an experiment. Its somewhere between bad science and propaganda.

Re:What does problematic mean?

[houghi]

They are not studying everything at the same time. They study something very specific. They study "Abuse on twitter". This is not so different to "Xmas messages on twitter".

So you first see how many messages are send. That you compare to the total amount send. This both in total and per individual. You will see that some get none and some get a lot.
You can even analyze from how many people it is from. You will see some will send nothing and some will send a lot. Some will even send something to themselves.

Once you have that information, you can look at different factors. e.g. country of where the message comes from and is send to. You can also loom at age, gender, activity in general per account and a lot more things.

The focus could be a conclusion of a genral research. You should not START with a focus group, because that will skew the results.

As you stated,the best social studies tend to take big trends and parse then into pieces. If you start with only women, you start with peices already.

They should have gone with "Abuse on Twitter" instead they went with "Abuse on women that use twitter". This is just as horrible as looking for "Criminal behaviour among black males" or "Greed among the Jewish population" or "Patriachial behaviour among fat bold white males". Because you are clearly steering the investigation.

And let us look a bit closer. From the website: "778 women politicians and journalists". So not only are these women, these are women in jobs that are in aprofession that will get controversial reactions, no matter what.

e.g. if they have an opinions on e.g. birth control, no matter their side, somebody will be against their opinion. And that is what people will tweet. So that number of one every 30 seconds suddenly sounds very low. It is ONLY one every 30 second? That's it?

Re:What does problematic mean?

[Anonymous Coward]

You could google for yourself you know. This one aims at celebrities, but there's others that show the same trend for the general public. https://demos.co.uk/press-release/demos-male-celebrities-receive-more-abuse-on-twitter-than-women-2/

Also, fun fact, women abuse people on twitter at the same rate as men, https://qz.com/692902/on-twitter-a-study-says-half-of-all-sexist-abuse-comes-from-women/

Those damn women hating women!

Re:What does problematic mean?

[William Baric]

I'm French. I had to do a mandatory military service. The minimum was 10 months, but in my case, I did two years. The regular "pay" for a conscript was 531F a month (about $80 per month). This was given to conscripts so they could buy hygiene products (soap, toilet paper, razors, etc.), since those were not supplied by the army. Of course, only men were required to do a military service. Women could choose to do it if they wanted to, but they were not required to do anything. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. In all Western societies, men have it a lot worse than women.

Re: What does problematic mean?

[Ol Olsoc]

Good point. Men are called "fags" all the time on the Webnets.

Boom! You win the debate! (seriously)

I've been called names like that, encouraged to kill myself, and other forms of "abuse". Yet I just read those posts without a thought, until you brought that up.

And while I try not to act like that - with occasional slips - I don't think a thing of it.

So the question is Why? Why is something that means almost nothing to me and most other males, an unforgivable assault upon women?

It certainly isn't that women cannot be cruel. I've seen women go after other women and attempt to destroy them without any regret.

The idea that all spaces must be made safe for those who can brook no adversity or disagreement isn't going to work.

Re:What does problematic mean?

[dcw3]

As a veteran and 7 year single dad, I'll answer for you. Taking care of a toddler is cake compared to war. Got it?

Didn't measure/compare against abuse rate for Men

[Anonymous Coward]

Without a meaningful baseline to compare against, what does the stat mean? (from what I've read, they didn't bother measuring the abuse frequency against male tweeters - sort of the same as when it's mentioned the appalling statistic that 10,000 women committed suicide in 2016 whilst deliberately neglecting to mention that 35,000 men committed suicide the same year)

Men?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not a peep about how many abusive tweets were sent to men, using the same criteria.

Why would that be, exactly? Is it because women are the weaker sex, and hence need to be protected from this sort of thing, whereas men are stronger and hence don't need such protection?

Or is it that nobody gives a shit about men, whether they are stronger or not?

Or maybe men get WAY MORE abuse on twitter, but pointing that out won't substantiate the desired narrative?

Lies, damn lies, and statistics.

[microbox]

Typical "intersectional" reporting. What is the base rate of abuse? Always be suspicious of people who quote absolute statistics. If you look at the research on this, you find that men are abused more than women, and that when a woman receives abuse, it is more likely to be from another woman. But the facts don't suit the narrative of the poor innocent woman being persecuted by the evil mens. PATHETIC.

I'm not sure you know what that word even means

[guruevi]

Does the female version of the app come with rockem sockem robots attached? You're on a public platform where people's thoughts are brought to you unfiltered. I am surprised that only 1 in every 125000 messages is mean to a woman.

How about you ignore that 1 message and read the other 124999. Or like me, read none.

How is someone "abused" by a tweet?

[Jarwulf]

Do the 280 characters or less reach out and pull their hair and choke them?

Re:Didn't measure/compare against abuse rate for M

[Shaitan]

And what constitutes "abused"

Context Is Missing

[Jane Q. Public]

I just looked at the published methodology.

I detect some issues with their methodology. Definitions of what constitute "abusive" or "problematic" tweets are explained in Appendix E.

Their explanations of the categories do not seem very precise. They are vague enough to include lots of edge-cases. Their examples are clear enough, but a clear example does not exonerate a vague criterion. (Hypothetical example: "I am going to murder you tomorrow" is certainly an example of abusive and threatening speech... but what else is in included as threating and abusive speech? Counterexamples are also necessary, else "I hate that rabbit in the field behind your house" might also be considered abusive.)

But more to the point, a full 55% of the tweets they flag as "abusive content" fall under the category of "other"... and that's a huge red flag.

They describe "other" thus: There will be some tweets that fall under the âother categoryâ(TM) that are problematic and/or abusive. For example, statements that target a userâ(TM)s disability, be it physical or mental, or content that attacks a womanâ(TM)s nationality, health status, legal status, employment, etc.

Uh... yeah. "Some" is 55%. And not only is this one the majority, it is a particularly vague definition. For example, if someone replies to an irate tweet, "Calm down! I know the Irish are famous for temper, but cool down a little!" is that "targeting a woman's nationality"? According to their description, it could be.

But here is the biggest problem with this study:

Nowhere did they compare this to any other groups. They singled out famous women and women in politics, but they didn't compare against famous men and men in politics.

And since there is no such comparison, it's all pretty much meaningless.

What if famous men and men in politics are "abused" on Twitter every 31 seconds? Or every 28 seconds?

Without that knowledge, does the study really say anything other than "the subset of people we chose got 'abused' at this rate?"

So what? Nothing to compare it to makes it pretty much useless knowledge.

While what they say may be true,

Amnesty International-- really?

[Harvey Manfrenjenson]

The disturbing part isn't that somebody published this absolutely idiotic study. (I won't go into why it is idiotic, since literally every other post has pointed out one or more serious flaws in the study-- rarely have I ever seen anything ripped to shreds quite this thoroughly). No, the disturbing part is that Amnesty International was involved. THIS is what Amnesty International is doing these days?

I mean I'm not an expert, but I always thought Amnesty International was one of the most respected of all human-rights organizations-- the sort of organization I would donate money to. Not any more.

A woman on Twitter is abused every 30 seconds

[DontBeAMoran]

I guess women either shouldn't use Twitter or limit their sessions to 29 seconds to avoid being abused.

A Woman on Twitter is Abused Every 30 Seconds

[ChatHuant]

...I can't believe she hasn't closed her account yet...

Re:A Nerd on Slashdot is

[Joce640k]

More importantly, how many of those abusive posts were written by women?

(and how many abusive posts did men receive?)

Matthew 11:8

[Hognoxious]

This. Without any baseline to compare against the statistic quoted is meaningless.

Re: A Nerd on Slashdot is

[Ol Olsoc]

It also very much depends on how you define attack. I would rather like to see the precise definition before rushing to any judgement.

I think you'll find that opinions run the gamut from actual abuse, to disagreement.

These claims often trend to the silly. My wife is asked out all the time on line. In today's world, that is sexual harassment. She just giggles and tells the guy he's not man enough, but many women need intensive counselling for the grave damage done.